Day two: Morning ritual

As part of my three hundred and sixty-five day project, I am supposed to take a photo during the course of the day, add it to a post, and then write an entry to accompany it. I therefore feel quite guilty for having already broken the conditions of my blog (- it's only day two). I didn't take any photos today; the battery pack for my camera needed to be charged. So, instead, I've added two images that were taken yesterday.

The photos are both of my baby brother. His name is Ibrahim, and he turned three on the twenty-third of March. He and I have been sharing a room since I started university. My brother is not what I would call a 'morning person'. Don't get me wrong, he likes to wake up from the crack of dawn, but he's developed a sort of morning ritual, in terms of what he does, once he is awake.

Let me first note that I do not like to rise at dawn; especially not when I've been up during the night, watching a World Cup semi-final. But, Ibrahim's cot is perpendicular to the foot of my bed, and he will lean on the rails and call out to me unrelentingly, until I yield and agree to carry him out from the cot, to the living area. Now, carrying him out to the living area sounds like a pretty straight-forward and simple task, but I wish that that were the end of it. He's fairly clingy and won't allow me to go back to bed; I have to be up from the crack of dawn, with him.

What he comes up with, to persuade me to wake up and carry him out of his cot, is actually quite intelligent/ entertaining. He says things like, "Nana, it's not night-time anymore... I can see the light [coming in through the blinds]", "Nana, I need to do a piss-piss", "Nana, I'm gonna zomit (vomit)", "Nana you look beautisool (beautiful)", "Nana, I'm gonna kwhy (cry) [if you don't pick me up]", "Mum said you hath to listhen (have to listen) to me!". In every case, except the first, he's usually lying, lol.

But back to his ritual. The first thing he does once we're both awake and in the living room, is turn on the television and switch the channel to either ABC1, 2 or 3 (depending on the time/ programs being screened). Then he gets comfortable on the couch, hugs his blanket and sucks on a pacifier he should have outgrown more than a year ago. After half an hour or so, he'll nudge me and absent-mindedly ask me to make him an ouhh, which is an onomatopoeiac word that Arabs use to describe something hot. In Ibrahim's case, an ouhh is a bottle of warm milk; and that's what he's holding/ drinking in the photos. Later, he'll again absent-mindedly ask me to make him two small lafaat (wraps of Lebanese bread); one with Nutella- or chocolate- as he calls it, and the other, with peanut butter. Throughout this entire ritual of his, he gets annoyed if I try to engage in conversation with him, change the television-channel, or ask him to do something (like go to the toilet). As I said, not a morning person.

Why I continue to tolerate this sourness of his every morning though, is because, when university resumes and I don't have time to join him for his little ritual anymore, I am going to miss it.

Day one: Tayta

My grandmother is an elderly woman of eighty-four years, and has been a widow now for more than ten years. So, although she has her own home, my father and his siblings fear for her welfare and insist upon her staying at one of their homes, most nights. My father has ten siblings though, and only three live abroad, so it takes quite a while for our turn- to have our grandmother stay over at our family home- to come up. It is a time that we look forward to, and cherish. My grandmother, or tayta as we affectionately call her in our Arabic tongue, came to stay last night.

I love the fact that, when she's here, her presence has the effect of bringing my immediate family closer together. Not only do we dine together, but we also remain in our places around the dinner table long after we've finished our respective meals; exchanging stories, jokes and opinions with one another. Tayta always seems to have these fitting anecdotes up her sleeve. The one I most enjoyed hearing last night went along these lines:

Many years ago, my grandmother's mother and mother in-law went to watch a film at the cinemas in Lebanon. This was when cinematic film had first reached the country, and so my great-grandmothers were unaware of how exactly it worked/ what to expect. My great-grandmothers both used to wear the niqab, which is a garment that covers the entire body, including the hair and face, except for the eyes. But because Muslim women do not have to dress this way in the presence of females, and because each cinema was sex-segregated (remember, this was the early-to-mid twentieth century), my great-grandmothers took off their respective face coverings during the film. They, and many other women, were thus startled to see a man appear in their cinema, just minutes into the course of the film, and as a result, they hurriedly replaced their face coverings. It was only later that they realised that this man wasn't actually a person in the flesh, but rather, one of the actors on screen! I guess my great-grandmothers really were naive about cinematic film. They must have assumed that it would be more like live theatre.

I enjoy hearing such personal accounts from tayta, as they not only shed light upon the greater context in which she once lived, but they also shed light upon my grandmother herself. She is a remarkable woman, who is selfless, patient, pious, inquisitive, humble and humorous.

The photo I've added was taken this morning, after breakfast. As i mentioned, we tend to have large collective meals when tayta is over. So there was a table-full of pasta, fried eggs, oregano and cheese pizzas, olives, labneh (a form of Arabic yoghurt), shangleesh (a form of Arabic cheese), and Lebanese bread. Not that my photo caught much of that, since it was taken in the aftermath of our meal, haha. My father's brother, sister and two sister-in-laws also came to join us during breakfast, so something the photo did catch were the little black-and-white cups that my aunts and uncle sipped Lebanese coffee from. There's also a bottle of tomato sauce, as one of my aunts insists on eating her cheese pasta with it, lol.



In reading this, I guess it's fair to say that my grandmother's presence not only brings my immediate family, but also my extended family, closer together. Because, her children and their families will always make an effort to see her, regardless of whose home she's staying at. And this, in effect, allows us all to interact with one another frequently. She is the figurative backbone of our family, and a person I admire and love.